Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.
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There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
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A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.
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Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
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Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
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Live with no time-out.
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I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.
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Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.
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Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.
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To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
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Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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The renewed use of lobotomy today is particularly applicable to women: Because they do routine things, it is possible to take away their spirit of revolt, of debate, of criticism, and still leave them perfectly capable of making stews or washing dishes. It's terrible, this tendency to consider women something dangerous to society.
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To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
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I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
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I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.
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There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
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All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.
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I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.
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It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
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One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
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I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
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We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!
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To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
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I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.